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WILLIAM FOOTE WHYTE, <I>STREET CORNER SOCIETY</I Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 50(1), 79–103 Winter 2014 View this article online at Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.21630 C 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. WILLIAM FOOTE WHYTE, STREET CORNER SOCIETY AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OSCAR ANDERSSON Social scientists have mostly taken it for granted that William Foote Whyte’s sociological classic Street Corner Society (SCS, 1943) belongs to the Chicago school of sociology’s research tradition or that it is a relatively independent study which cannot be placed in any specific research tradition. Social science research has usually overlooked the fact that William Foote Whyte was educated in social anthropology at Harvard University, and was mainly influenced by Conrad M. Arensberg and W. Lloyd Warner. What I want to show, based on archival research, is that SCS cannot easily be said either to belong to the Chicago school’s urban sociology or to be an independent study in departmental and idea-historical terms. Instead, the work should be seen as part of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown’s and W. Lloyd Warner’s comparative research projects in social anthropology. C 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. INTRODUCTION Few ethnographic studies in American social science have been as highly praised as William Foote Whyte’s Street Corner Society (SCS) (1943c). The book has been re-published in four editions (1943c, 1955, 1981, 1993b) and over 200,000 copies have been sold (Adler, Adler, & Johnson, 1992; Gans, 1997). John van Maanen (2011 [1988]) compares SCS with Bronislaw Malinowski’s social anthropology classic Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1985 [1922]) and claims that “several generations of students in sociology have emulated Whyte’s work by adopting his intimate, live-in, reportorial fieldwork style in a variety of community settings” (p. 39).1 Rolf Lindner (1998) writes that even “one who does not share van Maanen’s assessment cannot but see the two studies as monoliths in the research landscape of the time” (p. 278). To be sure, the Chicago school of sociology had published contemporary sociological classics, such as The Hobo (Anderson, 1961 [1923]), The Gang (Thrasher, 1963 [1927]), The Ghetto (Wirth, 1998 [1928]), and The Gold Coast and the Slum (Zorbaugh, 1976 [1929]). But none of these empirical field studies were as deeply anchored in the discipline of social anthropology or had been, to use Clifford Geertz’s (1973) somewhat worn expression, equally “thick descriptions” of informal groups in the urban space. Whyte’s unique ability to describe concrete everyday details in intersubjective relations created a new model for investigations based on participant observations in a modern urban environment. SCS is a study about social interaction, networking, and everyday life among young Italian-American men in Boston’s North End (Cornerville) during the latter part of the Great 1. Typical examples of this research tradition are Anderson (2003 [1976]), Gans (1982 [1962]), Kornblum (1974), Liebow (2003 [1967]), Suttles (1968), Vidich & Bensman (2000 [1958]). OSCAR ANDERSSON graduated with a PhD in Social Anthropology from Lund University, Sweden, in 2003. His thesis is about the development of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology between 1892 and about 1935. In 2007, his thesis was published by Egalit´ e´ in a completely new edition. He is currently working with the same publisher on the Swedish translations, and publications, of books that are regarded as part of the Chicago school heritage and beyond, with comprehensive and in-depth introductions that place each book in the context of the history of ideas. Previous titles include The Hobo (1923) and Street Corner Society (1943). Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to Oscar Andersson, Malmoe University, Faculty of Health and Society, Department of Health and Welfare Studies, S-205 06 Malmo,¨ Sweden; [email protected]. 79 80 OSCAR ANDERSSON Depression. Part I of SCS describes the formation of local street gangs, the corner boys, and contrasts them with the college boys in terms of social organization and mobility. Part II outlines the social structure of politics and racketeering. Whyte spent three and a half years between 1936 and 1940 in the North End, which also gave him a unique opportunity to observe at close range how the social structure of the street corner gangs changed over time. The study is still used as a valuable source of knowledge in concrete field studies of group processes, street gangs, organized crime, and political corruption (Homans, 1993 [1951]; Short & Strodtbeck, 1974 [1965]; Sherman, 1978). Today, SCS feels surprisingly topical even though the book first appeared 70 years ago. What seems to make the study timeless is that Whyte manages in a virtually unsurpassed way to describe people’s social worlds in their particular daily contexts. Adler, Adler, & Johnson (1992, p. 3) argue in the same manner that SCS represents a foundational demonstration of participant observation methodology. With its detailed, insightful, and reflexive accounts, the methodological appendix, first published in the second edition, is still regarded as one of the premier statements of the genre. [ ...]SCS stands as an enduring work in the small groups literature, offering a rich analysis of the social structure and dynamics of “Cornerville” groups and their influence on individual members. SCS has thereby come to have something of a symbolic significance for generations of field researchers in complex societies. As Jennifer Platt (1983) examines in her historical outline of participant observation methodology, this took place mainly after Appendix A was published as an additional part in the 1955 second edition (p. 385). Lindner (1998) also points to the importance of the Appendix, and thinks that “With the new edition the reading of SCS is stood on its head: now the reader begins as a rule with the appendix, and then turns to the actual study” (p. 280). As a consequence, SCS has come to be considered as “the key exemplar in the textbooks of ‘participant observation’” (Platt, 1983, p. 385); furthermore, numerous studies have used it as a symbol of how participant observations ought to be done. After SCS gained its iconoclastic status, the knowledge of the historical development of the study seems to have lost its importance or even been forgotten. For this reason, it might not be so surprising that researchers, as the introductory quote from van Maanen indicates, have often taken it for granted that SCS belongs to the Chicago school’sresearch tradition (Klein, 1971; Jermier, 1991; Schwartz, 1991; Boelen, 1992; Thornton, 1997) or that it is a relatively independent study that cannot be placed in any spe- cific research tradition (Ciacci, 1968; Vidich, 1992). There are at least four reasons for this. First, although Whyte was awarded a prestigious grant from the Society of Fellows at Harvard University in fall 1936, he was not a doctoral student at the university. Instead, he defended his doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago in 1943. Second, SCS is about classical “Chicago” topics, such as street gangs, organized crime, police corps, and political machinery. Third, Whyte conducted fieldwork in an urban environment like many Chicago sociologists had previously done in the 1920s and 1930s. Finally, parts of SCS have, together with Chicago classics, been included in the Chicago school of sociology compilation volumes; a typical example is The Social Fabric of the Metropolis: Contributions of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology (1971). Given these facts, it is quite easy to take for granted that Whyte was part of the Chicago school’s research tradition or was an independent researcher in a historical period before anthropology at home had been established as a research field. However, by using archival documents from Cornell University and other historical texts, I have traced the SCS to a social-anthropological comparative tradition that was established by W. Lloyd Warner’s Yankee City Series, and later in Chicago with applied research in the JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI 10.1002/jhbs STREET CORNER SOCIETY AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 81 Committee on Human Relations in Industry during the period 1944–1948. The committee, led by Warner, had the aim of bridging the distance between academia and the world of practical professions. Whyte’s anthropological schooling at Harvard University led him to A. R. Radcliffe-Brown’s structural functional explanatory model in SCS.2 In the first two sections, I will describe Whyte’sfamily background and the circumstances behind his admission to the prestigious Society of Fellows at Harvard University. In the following two sections, I will first examine how Whyte came to study corner boys’ and college boys’ informal structure in Boston’sNorth End. I will then analyze why Conrad M. Arensberg’s and Eliot D. Chapple’sobservational method was such a decisive tool for Whyte for discovering the importance of informal structure and leadership among street corner gangs. In the next section, I will outline the reasons that led Whyte to defend SCS as a doctoral dissertation in the sociological department at the University of Chicago and not Harvard University. Thereafter, I will examine why Whyte’sconclusion that Cornerville had its own informal social organization was such a ground-breaking discovery in social science. In the two final sections, I will situate Whyte’s position in the historical research landscape of social anthropology and sociology in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s and then, with the help of a diagram, set out which researchers exercised the most important direct and indirect influences on his thinking. BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND William Foote Whyte was born on June 27, 1914 in Springfield, Massachusetts. Whyte’s grandparents had immigrated to the United States from England, the Netherlands, and Scotland. His parents were John Whyte (1887–1952) and Isabel van Sickle Whyte (1887–1975).
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